


Things of Little Worth

by Brigdh



Category: Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Genre: 19th Century, Backstory, Disability, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 06:06:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2802260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brigdh/pseuds/Brigdh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ahab and Starbuck, on the homeward voyage after Ahab's first encounter with Moby Dick. </p><p> <i>Perhaps God grants respite even off the howling, pagan Patagonian coast, or perhaps it was Starbuck’s hand, which yet lay on Ahab’s leg, the two opposing forces – the frozen fingers and the fevered thigh – having gone some way toward reaching a balance.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Things of Little Worth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_alchemist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_alchemist/gifts).



A ship tossed wildly across a storm-stirred sea, tossed like a thrown coin. The storm was lightning and hail; ice filled the air and coated the ropes and spars; the ocean was too full of salt to freeze and so its spray struck the sailors with a cold worse than that of the winter air, as though below the water’s surface waited the freezing treacherous hell of Dante’s poem.

On board the ship all was a mad rushing – sails raised and lowered, boats and barrels bound tight, rigging rearranged – as though it were the frantic, frenzied quality of the work that mattered and not its purpose. No task of man would save or damn the ship now, but work on, sailors! Mimic the roiling, foamy, crashing waters – the boiling, blackened, whirling heavens – and make the deck their mirror: a ceaseless bustle of industry and toil with no goal but destruction. You might still lose your lives, but perhaps at least your transition between this state and the next will be eased, if you have created a similarity between them.

Only one man in all this tumult was still; a single fixed point below, not above, and by which no life-loving man would wisely set his course. It was the Captain of the ship, the man called by his few intimates Ahab, who lay in his hammock during this storm-chaotic crisis neither from fear nor sloth, but from fever and sorrow. A lantern hung in the cabin with him, swaying with the motion of the captain-less, anchor-less, sail-less ship. Its light and shadow ran crazily to and fro about the small room, and a viewer new to the ship could be forgiven for not, at first, seeing the source of Ahab’s suffering. His leg was missing: not hidden by the pitching, plunging darkness but truly gone, only recently taken by an animal that lacked both mind and mercy, remorseless as its home the sea.

Ahab could hear the creaking of the ship as the wind bent the masts, the sharp crack of too-near thunder, the crash of waves sweeping across the slanted deck not far over his head, but in his mind’s eye he saw only the past. His fist clenched as though he again held the knife with which he had stabbed – feebly! futilely! – the whale; he snarled with rage, he shook his head in denial, as he again rebelled against the agony of his dismemberment; his body tossed in his hammock, diving aside now as he had not then, as if by enough effort he might still evade what had already happened. It was from such demanding daydreams that the opening of the door awoke him. 

Into the small cabin came a man in a waxed overcoat, sluggish and partly solid drops of sleet spilling from his hem. He pushed back his hood, revealing the face of Starbuck – not yet chief mate, though he would come to fill that role later aboard another ship, and there is no mortal man who can say whether it was Starbuck’s long-predetermined fate which led him to the _Pequod_ or a chance, unwise choice, made perhaps at a moment such as the one now told of. For in this moment Starbuck was merely the third mate, to whom had been delegated the chore of checking on the ill and raving captain, a task the higher officers considered less pleasant than confronting the winter storm.

The two men regarded one another. Starbuck’s cheeks and nose were red from the bitter wind that continued to howl about the confines of the cabin; Ahab’s face was flushed likewise, but his color came from an inner heat. 

“Well, captain?” said Starbuck. “How is thy leg?”

Ahab’s only answer was a laugh.

Starbuck frowned at such a rebuff, but stepped forward, catching Ahab’s hammock with one hand to still its wild swaying. “Speak,” he said. “I am no physician, but if thou art in pain, speak out, and I will endeavor to soothe the hurt.”

“How will ye soothe that which isn’t there?” And Ahab pulled aside the sheet which would have covered his leg, had his leg not lain on some unknown ocean floor. 

But Starbuck neither flinched nor turned his eyes away from Ahab with that look of discomfort and fear which many a man wears to face grievous injury, as though to see it upon another were to invite it upon oneself. Such avoidance may charitably be called polite discretion, but it bears many of the signs of superstition, despite it being as common on Nantucket as on any Pacific isle. Starbuck, as said, stood still, studying Ahab’s thigh with the slow scrutiny of a surgeon. The unneeded length of Ahab’s trouser had been cut away and its ends pinned back to reveal his remaining flesh. The wound itself had closed, but the skin above and about appeared red and swollen, not solemn with its loss but angry. 

Starbuck hesitated, then stretched out his hand to touch Ahab’s thigh. He bore upon himself the marks of the storm, and his fingers were as roughened and flushed as was Ahab’s leg, though for Starbuck the cause came from the outer world and not the inner, and would soon fade, given warmth and human comfort. Ahab bore that cold, tentative touch stoically, as he had born the touch of all those who had sought to treat him since his fatal encounter with the whale. None could grant his most consuming wish – not to be healed, but to likewise gash and grieve Moby Dick – and so none were of any use to him. 

Gazing into Ahab’s eyes, Starbuck seemed to discern something of the furious mania that ruled him. “Men have lived with worse,” said Starbuck, speaking in calm and measured tones.

“And men have died from less. Why talk to me of ‘men’? What care I for ‘men’? Only one am I, only Ahab, and only Ahab knows what Ahab suffers, and only Ahab knows what it is which will satisfy Ahab.”

“There is no need for it to be so. Speak, Sir, and share either thy suffering or thy satisfaction, and then it will not be Ahab’s millstone alone.”

“What fool asks to carry a millstone? Or should I instead say albatross?” Aside, he added to himself, “Aye, for are not such birds white? And, like the mariner of the poem, I bear no love for the slimy things that crawl upon the sea.”

Faced with Ahab’s stubborn scorn, Starbuck felt within his breast the spark of answering anger. “If thou wilt not speak, and dislike to hear me speak, what is left for we two to do?

Ahab drew breath to build his wrath upon Starbuck’s pique, and like mirrors set face to face, the two might have gone on to reflect one another to indistinct infinity, spiraling downward forever to greater and greater hate, until, like the bottomless sea, they disappeared in the darkness of those God-abandoned depths. But for some reason Ahab drew a second breath. Perhaps God grants respite even off the howling, pagan Patagonian coast, or perhaps it was Starbuck’s hand, which yet lay on Ahab’s leg, the two opposing forces – the frozen fingers and the fevered thigh – having gone some way toward the balance of one another.

“Sing, then,” ordered Ahab.

“Sing, Sir?”

“Aye. Any song that takes thy fancy. Let us pass the time with some sounds more full of sense than what either thou or I can produce.” Ahab still burned with the force of his blasphemous passion, but even as the storm outside bore within the very center of the tempest a spot of calm, so too did Ahab’s madness now allow him a breath for the small and shallow pleasure of human society. It was no grand, awe-inspiring thing – two sailors in a cabin, men no longer young and never beautiful – but if it was not fit to set upon an altar, still it took some of the lines from Ahab’s face.

Starbuck considered a moment before choosing his melody. The Quakers hold that God prefers his worshippers silent, and so they sing no hymns; Starbuck might have known the songs of some other sect, but he did not sing them now. Nor did he sing a sailor’s song, the cheery bawdy chanties that while away the hours on the decks of every navy’s ship. He sang, instead, an old song, one of tragic love. His voice was not the sort novels usually enshrine; he did not ornament his song with an opera _diva_ ’s coloratura, nor did he display that sweet inherent timbre that so oft accompanies the innocence of milkmaids and nymphs. And yet neither was his voice entirely unsatisfactory. He found his note and held to it; he was clear and loud enough to be heard above the storm’s accompanying drums and horns; and though he had an amateur’s grace, he did not trail away in mumbles, downcast eyes, or awkward shuffling of feet.

He finished by repeating the verse dearest to his heart:  
“ _But though I go I'll surely come again,_  
 _If I go ten thousand mile, my dear,_  
 _If I go ten thousand mile._

 _The hills shall fly, my little turtledove,_  
 _The roaring billows burn,_  
 _Before my heart shall suffer me to fail_ ,  
 _Or I a traitor turn, my dear_ ,  
 _Or I a traitor turn_.”

When he let the last word drop away, the only sound was that of the winter without, the storm still scratching at the cabin’s walls. The entire ship tumbled from wave crest to trough like the first pebble of an avalanche: small, rolling, falling, powerless in itself but carrying within it the seed of onrushing catastrophe. 

Ahab closed his eyes. “Go, man,” he said, “thou hast done enough.”

Starbuck cleared his throat. After the melody of his song, to speak without a tune seemed oddly plain. “Is there nothing I might fetch thee? A drink, Sir – water, or rum, or the surgeon’s laudanum – ”

“No. I will sleep now. I can rest.”

Starbuck nodded, and offering neither further argument nor comfort, he left the room much as he had entered it: quiet and stoical, a man made for hard work, but equally capable of great gentleness. The storm took him in its hands as he emerged again on deck, roaring with the fury of a predator denied its prey, for the ship still rode above the waves, and the sailors to a man were still undrowned. The violence and the zeal did not shake Starbuck, for it seemed to him that he had come from facing their greater part, a storm bound within a breast and yet far more cataclysmic than any that had ever torn and scattered the clouds in the sky.

But if comfort is only a palliative and not a cure, still it is a rare, precious thing in this world. If it could be barreled, it would sell for far more than mere spermaceti; its hunters would chase it farther and longer than any whaler; they would risk more than limbs and life in its pursuit. Ahab stood in need of a single drop of comfort more than an entire ship’s hold of oil, even were it all from his loathed white whale. Starbuck had seen that. Yet, like a cup so full it could accept only a single additional drop, Ahab would be slow to let comfort seep into his soul. If he would do more, Starbuck would need to return to Ahab’s side again and again, past this voyage’s length, onto the shore at Nantucket, and even, perhaps, beyond. It would be a mighty task. Starbuck drew a deep breath, filling his lungs like a diver before the drop, and stepped into the storm.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, the–alchemist! I know I had to change a few of the canon's details (Starbuck and Ahab don't seem to know each other before the Pequod), but I was trying to combine your requests for backstory and H/C. I hope you enjoy it! Thank you to AlterEgon for betaing! 
> 
> The title comes from a line in _Moby Dick_ :  
> And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
> 
> The reference to an albatross and "Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea" are from _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
> 
> The song Starbuck sings is "The Little Turtledove". Complete lyrics can be found [here](http://www.contemplator.com/england/dove.html).


End file.
